


Hollywood Lights

by distantattraction



Category: L.A. Noire
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-23 19:48:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21086822
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/distantattraction/pseuds/distantattraction
Summary: She's sixteen when she meets her husband. She's twenty when she realizes he's worthless. She's twenty-six when someone finally reminds her that the world isn't supposed to be like this.





	Hollywood Lights

**Author's Note:**

> How devastating it must be to realize that achieving your childhood dreams has ruined your childhood.

Gloria is sixteen when she runs away from home. She catches a bus out of Albuquerque as far as she can afford, and then she hitchhikes the rest of the way to L.A. Her parents don't send her any letters asking her to come home. They can't. They have no way to know where she is. Even Gloria barely knows. She just knows that she wants to be in the pictures, and the place to do that isn't home.

It's not easy. There are dozens of women and girls at every casting call she sees ads for in the papers. She arrives at the auditions for _Beast of the Amazon_ extras with precious few nights' stay left at her hotel and little money for food. The hunger doesn't help her nerves.

She waits in line all morning and well into the afternoon, but she finally makes it into the audition room. The director is there, and the producer, and little Gloria who wants this so, so badly.

She does her audition. It goes well, she thinks. Then she stands up to shake their hands and faints.

Gloria wakes up on a couch in the room, her head resting in the movie producer's lap. Her face flushes. She's absolutely mortified. She tries to sit up quickly, but the movement makes her feel sick again. The producer shushes her and gently pulls her back down. He tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear.

He tells her that her audition went so well that he's going to cast her in a speaking role, and Gloria is so excited that she immediately feels better. He asks for her phone number, saying he'll need to get in touch about the filming, and she gives it to him without hesitation.

Mark Bishop does call her about the movie, but he mostly calls her with invitations. He invites her to fancy dinners, which she accepts graciously. He invites her out shopping, where they buy nice dresses for their next fancy dates.

He invites her to a friend's house, where they use his private projector to watch Mark's last film together. Gloria is enamored. She's never seen anything like it. She grabs at his hand in the dark when the movie reaches its climax, and he squeezes it back.

He invites her to walk on the beach with him. She's never seen the ocean with her own eyes before. It's beautiful. He holds her shoes as she dips her feet in, and they both laugh when a sudden wave dampens the hem of her dress before she can run back. She lays her head against his chest, sand clinging to her wet feet, and listens to the low rumble of his chuckle.

Mark invites her to bed. It is her first time. It doesn't hurt as much as she expected it to. He takes her to bed many times after that, and Gloria never sees any reason to turn him down. She has fallen just as deeply in love with him as she is with Hollywood itself. She thinks she might follow him anywhere.

He invites her to live with him, but she wouldn't dare do something so bold as to move in with a man she's not married to. He rents her an apartment instead, and Gloria is able to spend her days working on her acting instead of worrying about money.

Three weeks before her eighteenth birthday, Mark proposes. She screams _yes_ and spends the rest of the week staring at the ring on her finger. They get married two months later.

The first two years of married life are like something out of a fairy tale. Gloria gets to come to every day of filming. She does so with wide eyes, absorbing the sights and sounds as if they were a five-star meal. She gets to watch actors craft scenes in intricately decorated sets while the director angles his camera just so to capture the shot. She loves it. She loves every goddamn second of it.

The crew all fawn over Mark's brand new wife. The hair and make-up artists do up her hair and face when they have spare time, telling her how much nicer she is to work with than the big stars with their nasty personalities. The costume designer pulls clothes off the racks to show Gloria how they'd dress her if she was a part of the cast. She fills in for extras on occasion, when someone is too sick to make it to set. Gloria sweats under the lights, but her cheeks glow with joy.

The female leads send her unpleasant looks, but she ignores them. They're just jealous. They have to strive to get cast if they want to make it onto a set like this. Gloria can waltz in whenever she likes. She doesn't have to worry about work or money or anything. She's moved into Mark's apartment in the center of Hollywood, where she can be surrounded by pretty people all the time.

Mark still takes her out for the dinners and the shopping and the walks, but he also holds her close when they're at home alone together. He tells her silly stories about the film industry. He sits beside the director on set with Gloria at his side, leaning her head against his shoulder. It's a good life. She enjoys it very much.

But as the months pass, Gloria stops feeling welcome on set. The crew stops doting on her. The extras glare at her. Worst of all, Mark frowns when she asks to come to work with him. Eventually, she stops asking. She stays at home instead, wondering what changed. Gloria turns the question over in her head as she does the laundry and cooks dinner. For nearly a month, she has no answers. She simply takes Mark's coat when he comes back home, receives a brief kiss on the cheek, and feels lonelier than ever.

Then she realizes that her husband doesn't love her anymore.

The revelation rocks her. She chews on her painted nails, leaving deep ridges in the polish. Gloria frets over it for days. She's barely even twenty. She doesn't have any children yet. She can't be entering into a loveless marriage already. 

It's a busy time at the studio, so she knows she'll be a bother, but Gloria calls a taxi to take her to the set anyway. She has to talk to Mark. She has to know what they can do to save their relationship.

When she walks onto the set, Mark is talking to a girl. She's a teenager, a child, really, and though Gloria can't hear what they're saying, she can see the girl giggling whenever Mark speaks. A lock of hair has fallen free from its pin to curl into her face. Mark tucks it back behind her ear, and she flushes.

Gloria feels sick. She turns around and stumbles back to the sidewalk. The sun shines brightly into her eyes, and she blames it for the tears she blinks away.

It's not that she's never seen Mark flirt with other girls before. It happens sometimes when he thinks Gloria isn't paying attention. He likes to feel desired. She doesn't blame him for that.

No, the problem is that this is the first time she's seen him for what he is: a thirty-seven-year-old man flirting with a girl less than half his age. People have been calling Mark a child molester since long before she met him. They say it in front of Gloria, too, either not knowing or not caring that she can hear. Look at Mark Bishop's pretty young wife, they say. She is very pretty, and she is very, _very_ young. But she's old enough now that they'd like to try a taste of her too. What a waste that Bishop got to her first.

She felt shamed then, and she feels shamed now. She should have known better. She should have known that they were right. But she had thought herself special. After all, Mark chose _her_.

She walks home. It gives her plenty of time to think. She isn't worried about Mark not loving her anymore. Her concerns of the last week feel small and stupid now, even smaller and stupider than Gloria feels about herself. By the time she reaches their apartment, her feet hurt enough to distract from the ache in her chest.

She studies her face in the mirror. She is still beautiful, still untarnished by wrinkles, but she does not think she looks young anymore. There is something of a deadness in her eyes, a hardened, bitter edge she did not have when she set out for Los Angeles four years ago. She suddenly understands why Mark has barely touched her since they got married. She's too old for him now. 

She doesn't think Mark will be casting her in anything else, but she's tired of the hollow glamor of Hollywood. All that glitter is just a cheap veneer over a pit of rot. She's starting to feel just as empty as everyone else in this city is.

Gloria doesn't want to be with Mark anymore, but she doesn't want to leave him, either. What is she going to do without him? Find another husband? Not with the things she's seen. She's tired of men, too. Women like her are just toys to them.

She decides instead to make a life for herself. He used her, all those years ago, so she can use him. She talks to the crew of his movies, befriends the costume designers and the make-up artists. She spends as much time as she can watching the actors and actresses get made up for the camera. A particularly generous make-up artist, or perhaps a particularly lazy one, allows her to do up some of the extras' faces. Gloria develops a decent eye for color and a steady hand.

She sets up a service for the aspiring actresses who wait in lines outside the casting houses. For a fee, she will dress them in pretty clothes and paint their faces in just the right amount of cosmetics. The teens get made up to look older, and the women in their thirties are made to look younger. That's the Hollywood story. Gloria gets good at the makeovers. She even enjoys them.

Sometimes one of her clients recognizes her name and face from the press coverage of Mark's movies. The shrewdest of these women try to get to know her better, hoping to leverage her connection to Mark to further their careers. It's not a bad plan, Gloria admits, but she never passes their information to Mark the way they ask her to. She knows that he has no interest in the women and too much interest in the girls. Gloria won't be a part of the trades she knows take place behind the scenes.

When Mark's newest movie comes out, she is there on his arm at the premiere. The flashes of the photographers' cameras make her see more stars than four years of knowing Mark. She laughs to herself, her false red carpet smile replaced by a real one for a moment. Mark leans over, asking her what the joke is, but Gloria shakes her head. It's a private laugh, just for her.

She hasn't watched one of Mark's films in a while. As the movie starts playing, Gloria realizes she'll probably never enjoy one again. Without the veil of childish, starstruck love covering her eyes, she can finally see the truth of Mark's work. The writing is terrible, and the acting is worse. It's an ego trip, that's all. It's as worthless as the man himself.

A tear falls from her eye. Gloria wipes it away. The movement goes unnoticed in the dark of the theater. Mark slides his arm around her shoulders, and for the first time, Gloria does not lean into the touch. There is no love left in her for him.

After that, she wonders once every few months for five years why Mark even married her. He might have loved her once, the way he might love the sixteen-year-old girl working at her father's flower shop or the fourteen-year-old budding actress he cast in his latest picture. But she knows, just like Mark knows, that that kind of love doesn't last. 

It comes to her one day while she's vacuuming, the realization so powerful that it brings her to her knees in the plush carpet of their Hollywood home. She laughs. It's a broken, empty sound, but she keeps laughing. She laughs and laughs until the sounds turn to heavy, choking sobs. When Mark comes home, he finds her weeping into the living room floor.

"Jesus Christ, Gloria, what's wrong?" he asks, guiding her onto her feet and over to the sofa. She doesn't answer him except with more sobs, and he doesn't ask again. He brings her tissues and a glass of water and rubs her back while she cries.

He plays the caring husband, just as she's played the loving wife all this time. It's the very last role Mark ever cast her in. What better way to combat the rumors of being a child molester than by being happily married? Look pretty for the cameras, Gloria. It's all you've ever been good for.

When the goons break into her apartment, Gloria thinks it's rather a long time coming. Mark has gotten away with a lot in his life, and it's long past time for him to face some form of consequence.

But he doesn't, because he isn't here. It's only Gloria in the apartment, so it's only Gloria who gets threatened and pushed around. She cries out as the stranger's hand collides with her cheek.

The detectives' intervention happens very quickly. They come running in, blows are exchanged, and the ruffians are carted out. They poke around in Mark's things for a while, and then they sit across from her for questioning.

She's more or less honest with them. Gloria makes it her business not to know what Mark does with his time these days. Knowing what he's up to makes this ugly feeling grow in her chest, and she doesn't like that.

But then the detective asks about the girl.

"You know exactly what happened to her yesterday, don't you, Mrs. Bishop? You've been through it yourself."

How dare this detective accuse her of that? What does he know about her life? She's moved past that phase of her relationship with Mark. She's built herself a life separate from his. 

"I've been through quite enough today without your harassment, Detective." She spits the word out like a curse. "If you don't want to hear from my lawyer, I suggest you speak more carefully."

The detective barrels on, unaffected by her threats. "Jessica remembered a mermaid," he says. "The mermaid on the front of the prop store. You better come clean with me."

She looks straight into his eyes, challenging him to back down. "This is a sick town, Detective," she says. "Are you sure you really want to know? The truth is, my husband likes them young." He stares back at her, his gaze piercing.

"And you think that's okay?"

It's Gloria who looks away. His words are accusatory, but his tone isn't. A weight settles in her chest. She thinks it's guilt. She thinks it's shame.

He has unearthed a deeper truth in her. She could tell it to him, but her confession wouldn't help him with his case.

The truth is that a part of her _has_ started to believe it. Gloria watches Mark flirt with hopeful, stupid teens who are even easier to flatter than she had been. She knows that Marlon feeds those girls to B-movie actors with drowning careers aching to feel big again. She hears that girls get doped up and passed around from man to man at parties, and that all the Hollywood bigshots laugh about it.

After all that, Gloria has forgotten that this isn't the way things are supposed to be. It's been years since anyone reminded her of an alternative.

She tells the detective what happened. She tells him that she met Mark as a foolish sixteen-year-old who thought he was a god among men. She tells him it took her four years to learn any better. She tells him she knows there are bigger monsters dwelling in the shadows of the Hollywood lights. And then she sends him on his way.

The detective hesitates as she sits back down, cradling her stinging cheek. There is concern in his eyes, but she waves him off. "A girl learns to take knocks in this town, Detective," she says. "You go. I'll be fine."

He leaves, but not without looking back at her one last time. Gloria leans back on the sofa in her wreck of an apartment and sighs.

That man wants to be a hero, she can tell. He'll do anything to protect the honor of a foolish young girl who gave up her body in exchange for the smallest chance at fame. Gloria wonders if he has any idea how many girls he would have to play knight in shining armor for if he wants to clean up Hollywood. It's more than a single man could ever hope to save in a lifetime.

But he deserves to be able to save one. They all deserve that.

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you come back to your fourth ever fandom with six or seven years more writing experience than you had the first time around. Sometimes you use that experience to write about major characters.
> 
> Or, if you're me, you use it to write about a woman who had maybe four minutes of screentime in a game that has like five fans left after its release eight years ago.
> 
> If you've never heard the dialogue for the wrong answers in the Gloria Bishop interrogation, I do recommend giving [this video](https://youtu.be/xh9NQ7Hz6Mc) a watch. She's just a young woman who deserves better than she got.


End file.
